Notes on MP3 ID tags

Introduction

jDownloads supports showing the ID tag information held in MP3 audio files.

Typically the Download and Download Details layouts contain a line such as
V4 layout code
Clearly the {preview_player} will show the selected preview file whilst {mp3_id3_tag} will show the ID3 'tag' information if the preview file is an mp3 file. 
If it is not an mp3 file then the {mp3_id3_tag} is effectively 'ignored'.
The tags typically give details such as the artist, the music genre, date of production and so on as illustrated opposite.

For demonstration purposes the tool MP3tag v2.91, available from
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/(opens in a new tab)
was used to edit the ID3 tags of MP3 files as shown opposite.

There are however some challenges as the MP3 ID tags may be in different encoding such as
  • ID3v2.4-UTF8
  • ID3v2.3-UTF16
  • ID3v2.3-ISO8859-1
MP3tag  tags
That is what is actually shown depends on the encoding as illustrated in the three pictures below where 3 different encodings have been used.
The utf16 encoding has a strange 'yb' in the front of some text so should be avoided.
The utf8 has missed out the year but the iso variant looks OK. 
mp3 utf16mp3 utf8mp3 iso
Select the V4 button control panel then at top right click onV4 button optionsThen select the V4 tab mediaplayer and scroll down to V4 section id3 file info
Set option 'View MP3 File Information' to Yes.
Note that the item 'ID3 Tags Layout' has the relevant items to display the MP3 information.
MP3tag Options
 
Colin Mercer - December 2018 Modified June 2023

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